


Birthday Boy

by FloreatCastellum



Series: Marauder Moments [15]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Ouch, Sirius Black & James Potter Friendship, Sirius confronts Peter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:27:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25171606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FloreatCastellum/pseuds/FloreatCastellum
Summary: It is very nearly Sirius Black's 22nd birthday - he's had dinner at the Potters' in his diary for weeks.
Series: Marauder Moments [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1474679
Comments: 22
Kudos: 54





	Birthday Boy

‘James and Lily, Sirius!’ Peter yelled, and Sirius gaped in shocked horror. ‘How could you?’ 

‘What?’ was all Sirius could shout back. Peter - you - they-’ 

He was dizzy with the revulsion of it, blinded by his fury, by his grief, by his disbelief that it had really happened. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t find the words to say, to express his sheer horror at what Peter had done. 

‘You know this was you!’ Peter said, and though his face was the picture-perfect expression of someone distraught and afraid, Sirius thought he saw a glimmer of satisfied malice in his eyes. ‘You know this was your fault!’ 

‘Fuck you! Fuck you!’ Sirius was roaring at him incomprehensibly. ‘I’ll fucking kill you, Peter, I’ll fucking kill you!’ 

The muggles around them were staring, aghast, shrinking against walls and lurking in doorways, watching closely but shouting at one another to call the police. 

‘After everything James and his family did for you, Sirius - you betray them like this?’ Peter said, his voice loud and deliberate and clear. ‘Always welcomed you into the family, didn’t they, Sirius? You were practically one of them, weren’t you? Thick as thieves.’ 

‘You evil - you fucking -’ But Sirius still felt tongue-tied, still so utterly shaken and bewildered. This had to be a nightmare, it had to be. 

He advanced on Peter, but he had barely raised his wand before there was a blinding flash and an ear-splitting roar. He instinctively raised his arms to shield himself from the blast of heat that hit him with the power of a bludger, though his legs held firm. There was an immediate painful ringing in his ears and he blinked to see a thick cloud of dust, and smoke, and a vast crater in the middle of the road. Faintly, as though they were at a great distance, he could hear screams. 

Peter still stood there, right on the edge of the crater, which lay inches behind him. The dust swirled around him, and all Sirius could hear was the ringing, and the screams, and his own heavy breathing, and he was staring at Peter through the dust. Peter gave a small smile, which turned suddenly into a grimace of pain; Sirius looked down to see his hand bleeding profusely where a finger had once been, and then he back up at Peter’s face in bewilderment. 

Peter’s face shifted, he seemed to shrink, vanishing, disappearing in the dust like a ghost or a memory, and then, clearer perhaps than any other noise, he heard Peter’s squealing squeak as the bald, worm-like tail flicked over the rubble, and vanished away into the dust. 

There were distant cracks now too, and still screams, but Sirius was still staring at where Peter had stood, his blood thundering through his head. 

He felt James come and stand alongside him, and he glanced at him to see him casually squinting at the scene, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, hands in his pockets. ‘He bloody ratted me out. Should have seen that coming, eh?’ 

Sirius stared at him, and James winked, and then Sirius was laughing laughing laughing as he felt arms roughly seize him. 

He was doubled up from it, almost lifted off the ground as they pulled him somewhere, his stomach actually hurt from the laughter, even though his heart was cleft in two, even though the world had exploded like the road had. He could still hear screams and sobbing and he could see muggles furiously pressing on the chest of someone lying in the road, and there were others too, just lying around in odd positions, and he couldn’t stand the terror of it; he no longer knew if he was laughing or sobbing, only that he could not control the way his body seemed to collapse upon itself, the people either side holding him up. 

He felt himself being dragged away, and when he looked back he couldn’t really remember what had happened, because his head was swimming, and he kept thinking of all the stupid little signs that they should have realised. Suddenly a hundred memories of odd little looks and strange little sentences and occasional outbursts or pointed questions that in hindsight felt so obvious that Peter was losing his nerve, that he wasn’t to be trusted. They had known someone had gone rogue. They’d known that. And Peter had practically been telling them it was him. 

‘God, you fucking idiot, James!’ he found himself roaring. ‘Fucking idiot! Fuck!’ 

‘Shut up,’ he heard one of the people growl in his ear. ‘Shut up.’ 

‘Oi,’ he heard James say, frowning. ‘You were the one who suggested it.’ 

And he had, he had, of course he had. He’d done all the right things to protect his family, he’d had all the secrets, done everything right and then Sirius had tried to be too clever. 

‘He must have thought Christmas had come early, when you suggested that,’ said James. 

But he hadn’t suggested it. He thought he had, but Peter had been dropping all these little hints, had managed him so carefully, had played he and Remus off one another and confused everything so much, and now Sirius remembered, quite vividly, Peter frowning in apparent confusion as he asked whether it was a good idea if people knew who the secret keeper was.

He felt a squeezing, suffocating sensation, and the world was spinning until suddenly it wasn’t anymore, and he was being dragged down a long corridor, at the end of which was a black door. 

‘I did it, it was me!’ Sirius was howling, his voice echoing off the walls. ‘Me! I told him to! I told him to! It was his idea, but I told him to! Hah!’

Someone pulled at his hair, tilting his head back, and he realised for the first time that he was on his knees, in some dark room. A man was staring down at him, his face severe and cold. 

‘Oh, bloody hell, it’s that wanky politician,’ he heard James say. ‘Can’t bear him. Crouch.’ 

Sirius spluttered with laughter again, and another man appeared, looking down at him with a revolted, bewildered expression, twisting a lime green bowler hat anxiously in his hands. ‘Has he been confunded?’ he asked Crouch. 

‘No,’ said Crouch grimly. Sirius felt a wand being pressed uncomfortably hard into the underside of his chin. ‘You were the Secret Keeper for the Potters, were you not? Speak!’ 

Sirius just laughed. 

‘Good heavens,’ whispered the man with the hat. ‘He’s unhinged.’ 

‘Thirteen muggles, boy!’ Crouch roared at him, and Sirius felt his spittle fleck his face. 

‘Gross,’ said James flatly. Sirius laughed again. 

‘Thirteen muggles and your three best friends! A boy has been orphaned! Do you have no remorse? Do you have no soul?’ 

They thought he had done it. They thought he had blown up the street. Peter had set him up and slipped away - Peter, of all people! It was the kind of slyness he might expect from Remus, or the savageness he might have associated with Lily when she was angry, or the sheer drama of it that he might have seen in James. 

But Peter? Peter who they had to painstakingly and carefully guide through the animagus process? Who had needed constant reassurance and clarification for any one of their plans? Who had seemed to hero worship the very ground James walked on? It was ludicrous, bizarre. He couldn’t stop laughing about it - had he ever gone up to James and said, ‘hey, I think Peter is trying to kill you, and now that I think about it, do you think it’s odd that every shifty thing we think Remus has been doing has come from stuff we’ve heard from Peter?’, James would have laughed in his face too. 

‘You disgust me,’ Crouch was saying. ‘Well, it’s no use, you know. Your master is defeated. It was all for nothing.’

It was all for nothing. Because it had all been to protect James and his family and Sirius had utterly failed and it was Peter - Peter! - that had bested them all. Peter. 

He laughed as they wrenched him up again, he laughed as Crouch said some long paragraph in a monotone at him that was full of stupidly dramatic words like ‘willful betrayal’, ‘conspiracy to murder’, ‘collusion with dark wizards’, ‘ruthless murder of innocent muggles’, ‘lifetime’, ‘Azkaban’, ‘Potter’, ‘Pettigrew’, and ‘in the interest of public safety’. He laughed as he was dragged away again, and as he felt that squeezing sensation once more, and then suddenly he was utterly freezing, his feet sinking into cold, wet pebbles as he vaguely saw a stormy grey sea. 

He stopped laughing as he was wrestled onto a boat, because suddenly James’s voice was more panicked. ‘They don’t get it,’ he was saying. ‘Mate, this is out of control.’ 

‘There’s been a misunderstanding,’ Sirius said, as they pushed him roughly onto a little wooden bench. 

The scarlet robed man spat in his face. ‘They said on a radio that the boy’s just a baby. What the fuck is wrong with you? Scum.’ 

‘I suppose we’ve got you to thank,’ said another, as the boat bounced horribly over the waves and the wind bit at Sirius’s skin. ‘What you did to that poor family has ended it all. I’ll be raising a glass to the Potters tonight, but you - I hope you rot away here and die within the year.’ 

Sirius looked out at the steely grey sea, the laughter starting to bubble back up in his throat again, because if what he suspected was true, that was ridiculous. A complete over reaction. He hadn’t even had a trial. ‘Where am I going?’ 

Now the aurors laughed at him, and somewhere beneath the screaming, delirious grief, terror took his heart in an icy grip. Ahead of him, a fortress loomed on the horizon. 

A stupid thought came to him, and it made him laugh again. If he was stuck here, he would be late for his birthday dinner tomorrow, just like Effie had been late when she was meant to be meeting Lily. 

James would be really annoyed.


End file.
